CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2021
| Author | Delcea, Sergiu |
|---|---|
| Title | Anxieties about modernity: The Development of the Romanian Welfare State from the late-19th century to 1938 |
| Summary | On the whole, the literature on the origins of welfare states in late industrializing Central and Eastern Europe argues that redistributive institutions emerge as corollaries of modernization. Typically informed by the experience of North-Western Europe, existing studies depict how the various sequences of modernization generate the socio-economic issues that prompt policy makers to design welfare intervention. In this sense, CEE welfare states appear as a result of various functional or instrumental needs – insuring against new industrial life-course risks, cementing state-building by pacifying labor, bolstering economic productivity by replicating global best practices, or framing nationhood by cutting across ethnic cleavages. Yet, while such studies depict important mechanisms, they ultimately underestimate the complex inner mechanics of late industrialization. Specifically, existing studies do not fully capture that competing against the “core” collapsed in at the same time all of the transformations typically associated with modernity. This essentially forced political elites in late developing CEE, who lacked adequate resources to tackle simultaneous challenges, to proactively theorize solutions that cut across the challenges of state-making, nation-building and the economic transformation. Against this background, the lack of adequate experimentation time for a gradual and layered approach, prompted political elites to use self-reflexive logics, which essentially precluded any sequential-functionalist institutional development. The dissertation thus argues that dissecting in a precise manner how late modernization informs welfare state creation requires analyzing political elites’ open-ended ideational debates seeking to elevate specific socio-economic issues to the rank of a social question. In this line of thought, the dissertation argues, through a case-study of Romania from the mid-late 19th century to 1938, that welfare institutions were developed to replicate a specific class matrix believed to underpin Western development. In the contingent view of Romanian political elites, a holistic and integrative class matrix was envisaged to articulate the bottom-top demands that guided top-down theorizations of cutting across parallel challenges. To develop this argument I first draw on theories of self-reflexive modernity which open up space to analyze late development as an open-ended ideational construction. On a second level, I draw on sociological theories of social policy which analyze welfare state development as the process wherein political elites define problems of socio-economic integration and worthy addressees of would-be state programs. The dissertation proceeds by breaking down political elites’ narrative bricolage into its constitutive elements – the inherent contradictions of states and markets, the additional challenge of nation-building as a modernizing project and the co-constitutive national-international relationship. At each step, the dissertation analyzes how political elites used self-reflexive debates to identify the relevant socio-economic groups whose interplay was envisaged to generate the causal chains specific to Western modernity. To fully capture political-ideational conflict, the dissertation relies on a complete review of plenum Parliamentary debates from the 1880s to 1938, alongside additional Governmental sources ranging from legal texts to official journals. |
| Supervisor | Fetzer, Thomas |
| Department | Political Science PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2021/delcea_sergiu.pdf |
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